Paradoxism and (Outer)-Art: a New Cultural (Dis)Order?1 Interview: Mugur Grosu, Mircea Úuglea, Florentin Smarandache
MG:
Because I have, finally, before my eyes two significant works- your volume, Destiny (published last year although it was written 20 years ago!) and a more special work, Outer-Art, that we have to talk about without fail later on-, we can start interviewing you. At the beginning I am asking you to make a short introducing of your “inventions” until now: paradoxism, outer-art, etc. Could you place these proposed directions within a certain order of the vanguard currents? In 80’s, when the post-modernism was flourishing, you put the basis of a vanguard movement, Paradoxism. In the beginning of your volume of experimental art there was an interesting manifesto entitled “Ultra-modernism?”. What means this question mark? In manifesto’s end you said: “Let’s revolt against ‘classicised’ art and fight for a New Art World Order!” Considering the joking-crazy manner of your whole (non)artistic speech in that album, I am wondering if you don’t propose, sooner, a “new disorder” in the arts world!
FS:
All, who proposed a new style, provoked new apparent disorder. See the cubists, the futurists, the minimalists, the supremacists (Malevich), the constructivists (Kupka, Gabo, Rodchenko), the deconstructivists (in architecture), the baroqists, the orphists, the populists, View Art (Vasarely), Pop Art and the assemblists (Andy Warhol, Wayne Thiebau, Roy Lichtenstein), the conceptualists, the abstractionists. Even some less known attempts, as the rayonism (Larionov, Goncharova) in painting, based only on linear rays, stirred up the interest of a Kandinski. I like the experiments, I am crazy about them; and from here one comes to a lack of balancing, and again to a balance in a want of balance. Nothing can remain motionless. Not all the experiments are forced, as some seem to be initially. You can’t be successful from the first attempt: neither in art, nor in science. Thomas Edison did 1750 (!) of unsuccessful experiments concerning the burning of filament in vacuum until his discovery [the discovery = successful experiment]... Not only when the question doesn’t work different solutions are sought, but also when the people are bored/sick of it. They want to drink also another cup of tea! What would it be if no more poem was written, because nobody could reach Eminescu? And to read all the time his verses only. Joyce is not the only classicised experimentalist (in fact, he was enough blamed, rejected at his time: he was describing some scabrous deeds which made many influent ladies, from the
1 Starting from paradoxism, Florentin Smarandache initiated a movement in arts too, named in his characteristic way, “Outer-Art” (1990), i.e. ‘art behind art, or art without art’, and he published an album with such a title (2000). In his previous manifesto and antimanifesto for OUTER-ART [see also http://www.gallup.unm.edu/~smarandache/outer- art.htm] he pleads for making art as ugly as possible, as wrong as possible, and generally as impossible as possible. Therefore, all up-side down… smarandachely! It is no surprise that his second album is intituled “Outer-Art, the Worst Possible Art in the World!“ (2002). {I. Soare} high society, to turn up their nose... For instance, he detailed on two pages what a main character was doing at the privy: how the room was filling with pestilential smells, etc. Here is a joycean quotation, from memory: ”Into a ditch, her back a little bent in front, a woman is pissing like a cow.”). Those with the absurd theater (Ionesco, Beckett, Adamov), the same. Arrabal (with the theater of cruelty: real gooses are cut on the stage!). I won’t list all of them now... I have admired the movements of creation and I have read their rules: not to follow, but to infringe them. As well as Chaim Soutine, peintre maudit, between the two world wars, at Ecole de Paris, who was destroying periodically his paintings, I’m keeping my non-paintings. I am concerned with the involuntary painting, because deliberate art (with or without tendency), is artificial, insincere, unspontaneous. Any art is an artifice (David Graham). You have to surprise yourself if you want to be a poet (Robert Frost). I have also retort experiments to Yves Klein, or anti-compositions to De Kooning or Pollock (abstract-expressionists), whose paintings are however perceptible in repetitive units. You see, the avoidance of any form of art in order to give birth to outer-art: to paint as ...impossible as you can! Dear sir, once about 80’s, at the rubric of the beginner, in “Luceāfarul”, sustained by Geo Dumitrescu, where I was striving to publish, at the end of a year appeared a selection with the worst poems received by Geo from beginners - certainly, without mentioning the authors. I give you my word, I was reading these writings in a brewery, with other friends- writers, and we laughed till the tears came, and all of us wished to have a full of such anthology, which we had gladly bought- in comparison with the stiff verses published in every magazines, in which different poets sought to amaze in every way possible. What was happening to those novices: they didn’t obey to any rule, they weren’t ashamed to uncover their troubles, were not contaminated with influences and models, they had an amazing frankness! In the end, I considered their poems the best creations of the magazine. A real paradox! And my foresight was confirmed somehow in what is called today Junk Sculpture (sculptures of rubbish, sooner an assembling of waste). Well, this way of how to not write became as an emblem of paradoxism, later on extended to the way of how to not paint, how to not design, how to not sculpture, until the way how to not act, or how to not sing on stage - more clear: all upside-down. Look, in this way I have written “NonNovel”, “NonTheater”, “NonPoems”, ”Defective Writings”. Do you ask me how it is distinguished of dadaism? It’s very easy: dadaism had not a meaning (you take words out of a hat and form sentences), while paradoxism means to interpret in a reverse sense and to take the things contradictorily, in consequence, a meaning against the grain. A surprise for you will be the volume “Dedications” (2000), apropos of the book-object you have mentioned, Mugur. And, if I send you “NonPoems”, one cannot say if it is a volume of literature, or one of art - maybe you will make me clear. Have you seen how the linguists study the etymology of some Romanian words? After old Latin books of “correcting” the Latin spoken on Dacia’s territory and used for writing: the word is not this one, but that one...- but just that incorrectly grammatical Latin of that times, became the correct Romanian of present time! Yes, the paradoxism was developed during the post-modernist period of 1980’s, however I hadn’t relations with any post-modernist writer, even I avoided to join them, although I read the books of many of them. As regards paradoxism, I liked to not take into account the “precious indications” of any critic, but to write somehow upside-down, in counter-time. As vanguard it is placed in the line of dadaism, lettrism (I have been in correspondence with a French lettrist, François Lemaître), absurd-theater (Ionesco- teaching in Morocco, as a cooperate teacher, I received a few epistles from the playwright, he appreciating my volume “Le sens de non-sens”, which took to pieces the French clichés from a figurative sense to a proper one!; Beckett, Adamov). I specified formerly what I did in the artistic creation: I like art because I am not gifted for painting and drawing; I want to create as ugly as possible, as much against the common taste, in an unpolished, tasteless way; I used also the “found art”- taken from the nature in an unaltered state, as well as Robert Doisneau, the French photographer following in Dubuffet’s footsteps, who had said the spectacular one there was in the commonplace one! The prose writer Delia Oprea has visited an exhibition, “Les champs de la sculpture” close by Champs-Elysees, in Paris, where a sculptor, Niki de Saint Phalle, exhibited some puppets of six meters, vivid coloured (red, blue, yellow, white) which she named invariably “Nana” (she- fellow, rather ruffianly said). Niki declared: “At the beginning the public found them insulting for women, but it was not that what I wanted. That was, for me, a way to swell my femininity and my freedom, which had been repressed so many years.” I have liked a series of Stefan Balan’s wordings in counter-time, against the grain. Such a short metaphor, an antithetic one, in a few lines, says more than a full page of explanations. I was talking once with Jack Crowl, professor at UNM, at a “creative writing” program teaching how to write, within the Letters and Art Department, who had invited me, in the first months after I had come, to speak on European vanguards of Romanian origin: dadaism, lettrism, absurd theater, paradoxism. I told him: Jack, if I follow your course, I do it in order to write exactly upside-down what you learn us! The writing you must have in the blood. What attracts me at the American Universities is that you may propose a specific course outside any program and completely created by yourself, on a subject you like, with a bibliography you consider to be proper - I mean: a fully academic independence. And if you have students, all right, if not, the course is cancelled... In Romania, around 20 years ago at least, it wasn’t anything similar. The Americans call them “honour course”. And Jack gave me the idea in a restaurant, around a bottle of beer, to propose a course of “mathematical literature” (I had to choose a more specific title), involving also the computers in creation, containing literary experiments and curiosities; even an application of the literature in ... mathematics...ha, ha, ha! The style without style, for instance, this is a style too. Many times when you deny, you sooner affirm, in the sense that you stir up the interest for what you deny/ blame. Mircea has sworn me in face because of my vanguard, that I felt inclined to strike a fist at him and to break the computer interposed between us. It is good when someone gets on your nerves, then spring stars. You have to be provoked in creation. From Peter the Great’s will I have learnt that you have to be always in a state of war, a spiritual one, of course. Applied to our case, this happens when we hate cheerfully each other. Otherwise, the nerve disappears. In art the friendship diminishes the exigency and lazes the creation - in consequence, I appreciate your harshness against me. It’s better that you’re enemy to me, but I’m thinking if it’s worth losing time with the interview! You will present me in a bad light anyway...and, thank God, I have enough enemies (I can give some to other people, for instance, to you - no, thank you, you’re answering me, and then, you assail on me) who keep me awake with invectives, hold me in play, and that’s stimulating. But let’s remember the saying: God defend me from my friends, from my enemies I defend myself! The more contradictory I am, more paradoxistic I become. Grigurcu said that a controversy writer is more interesting than a flat one. It’s better that people swear you than they ignore you: that’s mean your ideas are gnawing them, are disturbing them. The original people are detested at first. “If the people praise you and cultivate you, that means you’re going on blunt paths”.(Sandberg). Have you read about American tribe Navajo’s diné philosophy concerning the life? According to Mircea Ţuglea I can quote Jean Baudrillard: contradiction does not exist anymore... Moreover, there is a tendency to transdisciplinarity in present- see also the respective group in Paris, led by B. Nicolescu. The transdisciplinarity is in full swing. See the new fields: bio-physics, bio-chemistry, mathematical physics, psycho-dramaturgy, literary therapy, artistic therapy etc. In other words: any association between a field X and another one Y (and the more antinomic is Y, the more attractive the association is!... it’s paradoxical, isn’t it?), so, the amalgams of any kind surprise nobody. A quotation from the infamous Marx: the extremes touch one another (communism and fascism, art and science etc.). And then why talking about geometry and narration? which are not just diametrically opposed! In the same modern logic there is also the notion “ paraconsistent crowd”, that is: a crowd which has common points with its exterior (complement)! [That seems curious and unbelievable, especially for classical logic, but: all is possible, the impossible too]. Then, “dialehtist crowd”{I don’t know the Romanian word for the first term, probably there isn’t one}: a crowd equal to its... exterior (complement)! Maybe you’ll think it’s absurd? {From a point of view, yes, from another, no}. The traditionalists (in art, science, literature) won’t agree with it, of course. The opposition to new is anticipated. Within the Russian post-modernism (1980-90), Mark Lipovetki grasps semantic antithesis (personal - impersonal, memory - oblivion, simulacra - reality, fragmentarity - unity) - he calls these “paralogical ones” [but they are, in fact, pure paradoxisms]. Chaos and cosmos join at Joyce, for instance, in “chaosmos” [chaos+cosmos=chaosmos]- and they come again to that mixture in my article about non-Euclidean geometries. That is : chaos and cosmos coexist - otherwise it is not possible, in fact. There is homogeneity within the framework of these polystratified combinations (between geometry and narration too), but also heterogeneity into homogeneity. And still because I was criticized in an e-mail (about vanguards) because I had mentioned about “the uglifying of the beautiful” through paradoxism I will give an example recently uncovered in the Russian postmodernism: Ilia Kabakov’s poetics relies on garbage. Yes, you have read correctly, “garbage” - because this represents death; yes, because this represents life: it is the result and the proof of our existence... Paradoxism gives an upside-down interpretation (etymologically speaking). “The mathematical poems” use mathematical concepts in the lyrical creation: algorithms (some conceived on computer), paradoxes (see: ”Paradoxist distichs”, 1998), tautologies, dualism (from formal logic), decomposition of linguistic clichés, in-tracing of expressions etc. Spanish poet Miguel de Asén uses an “aleatory sonnets” generator, as the computerist Adrian Rezuş announces me, which is a MS-DOS program. As regards the automatic creation methods on computer: I have bought once a soft of this kind, which had a data base with aleatory combined English verses and you never obtained the same poem [even on the computer, using the same instructions and inputs]. The idea was simplistic: every verse being semantically a single whole (independently understood with a classical syntax: subject-predicate-complement, etc.), the verses could be formed anyhow [without rhythm and rhyme, of course], because the whole didn’t contain nonsense. It was a linear programming, but we should did something non-linear. The data base be formed of syntagms, metaphors or only obsessive notions. Or more, as well as those in the artificial intelligence: to make evolutive programming, with dynamic operators: a program learns from other one, or (as it’s easier in present) it learns from its own experience; that is, you improve the poem on the computer, from stage to stage. Or a novel with removable leaves, like a cards game: they might be mixed anyhow to obtain a new novel (if you don’t like some version). In drama I have performed (algebraic) permutations of scenes (but within the same act)- a finite combinatory, giving birth to billions and billions of drama: the play is called “An upside down world”. The use of mathematics in the artistic creation- studies on these methods accomplished Solomon Marcus (Mathematical linguistic, Mathematical poetics). At a MAA congress, Joanne Growney has led a “mathematical poems” workshop and there we met; recently J.G. has published a review on Paradoxist Anthology II in the magazine (pay attention to title): “Humanistics Mathematics Network” (California). But also inversely: the lyricism in math (not strictly, stiffly scientific), in an article in “Mixed Non-Euclidean Geometries”...But this is an article written in a poetical, interrogative form, starting from a simple remark: combining the present geometries: Riemann and Lobacevsky-Bolyai (non-Euclidean ones) with Euclid (contradicting Hilbert’s axioms). An idea that has occurred to me since I was a schoolboy in Craiova and Rm. Vâlcea... Because the chaos has its poetic and charm... [The notion may be generalized to the “scientific poems” (borrowing methods also from other fields: physics, chemistry etc.), although it looks like strange! Camil Petrescu in person asserted that the literature extends through outside methods. (For instance, studying Marin Sorescu’s creation certain patterns have been uncovered; and then, with the aid of a computer, of some algorithms, it became possible to create in his style, using his vocabulary as a data base: in particular, his obsessive themes. Of course, I don’t refer to pastiching, but to the importance of the discovery and the method in self.] Algebraic permutations of scenes were performed in drama, giving birth to billions of drama (“An upside down world”).See also the experiments of the French group Oulipo [Raymond Queneau: “A hundred of thousands of poems”, Jacques Péréc: “The disappearance” (a novel in which the writer doesn’t use at all the letter “e”, the most frequent in French, and the critics who reviewed the book... didn’t even noticed the “disappearance” of that letter!), François Le Lionnais, etc.]. It’s true, I have had a rather strange destiny. My parents, peasants, sent me to a humanistic high school (although I had been remarked at the Olympiads at Mathematics) - they said at least I should became a teacher and learned a trade because that one was easy and I had much spare time. I left a village for going to school in a town (Craiova - where I felt miserably, and which I hate... it darkened my teen-age; although I have remained a great kibitzer of University of Craiova soccer team; I follow the scores of its games in the exile magazines). At Pedagogical High School - now Normal School - I studied the history of art (a compulsory object of study), I played the accordion (compulsory too- although I didn’t like), I sang in school’s fanfare (I played an instrument with a big bugle, called euphonium - tim tam, tim tam... I was accompanying) and choir [ the last two ones were optional- but, unfortunately, the music teacher, one named Sorin Benedict, selected/compelled me telling I had an ear for music; while my classmates were playing football in the school yard-to my spite!]. It happened around 1969-1972, probably some of you hadn’t been born yet. But there were also other unlucky fellows, with me, those selected for folk dances and playing groups, and those who joined school’s folk music band [that was a consolation for me, as it were]. After a humanist high school I followed a faculty of sciences, and after that I came back to art again. I abolished a field at the first failure to approach the other. And in this one I “distinguished” myself with another failure and I came back to the first love. From failure to failure, I oscillated between art and science. (Ionesco said that from failure to failure, with the absurd theater, he came to victory!) To come back to a question from an e-mail: there is nothing in “Outer-Art”, while in Dubuffet’s L’Art Brut [art-in-the-raw (Fr.)], there can be found some outlines, some forms; no matter they are naives, made by children or psychopaths - they exist; in fact, the literature of lunatics, in hospitals, shows interest too, see Alain Bouvier, “Les Fous Littéraires”. I am not doing art, but outer-art, so, as ugly as possible, as unpleasant as possible for the world... I apply the axiom: all is art (or all is not art!). There are some, more or less, young people who think they monopolize the culture, that only their tastes/ideas does matter - they forget that the art, the letters are subjective, complex in form and content, multi-stylistic, and the critic, or the poet/painter X is not the hub of the universe, that all people have to write according to his pleasure. Sometimes I propose myself to write against someone’s pleasure, for instance Mircea’s or Mugur’s - no offense, I’ve been commenting the (outer-)art phenomena. So, I leave my experiments so slipshod, non-artistic as they are! Ionesco said when we did not play anymore, we were spiritually dead. It is not about “Fleurs du mal” (Baudelaire) or “Flowers of mouldiness” (Arghezi) that meant ugliness’s embellish, but about beauty’s uglifying. The manifesto “Ultra-Modernism” is my outer-artistic creed (as a great non-specialist in art), and the question mark is rather a mark of exclamation! What should be after post- modernism? Eugen Simion proposed post-post-modernism, that sounds somehow redundantly to me, like a double-negation which is cancelled reciprocally. I have mentioned that “Outer-Art” (which means un-art, no-art, experiment, art outside art) represents the paradoxism in the artistic creation: scrawling, pictorial superpositions, hybrids of paintings+collages, mathematical formulas painted on rough copies, etc. Once, in the bathroom, my nose was bleeding - this is my healthy ...illness since I was a child; I took a piece of paper to not soil the floor, and the blood was dripping on the sheet ; some red streams and spots resulted, as if they were drawn with the brush, and I liked how took a shape images painted with the nose... Then I tried to move my nose from a side to another and to draw also other forms, and that calmed me. I have painted the cycle “Extra-Flowers” with ...the thread; and when my wife’s nail varnish overthrown - and resulted some exquisite little flowers- I said: Yes, that’s painting. “what do you do, are you crazy?”, she exclaimed. In this second (non)album I have painted with leaves and grass, because it had been too hard for me to go to the book-store after water colours, and at that very time I was in a mood for (non)painting - before the hobby was gone! Now I am in the humour for fractal art, figure in figure in figure..., and for mathematical art: have you seen how the curves and the surfaces are represented in 3D? Like some nets of words (subcurves of level) that render the outlines: spatial ideas. Here, Ecker’s optical illusions delight me. But the Work explains itself and sooner it doesn’t explain itself, at least not by the author, because it demystifies itself, reaches the vulgarity. Do not push me devilishly in sin any more. At the same time, I’d like you don’t feel forced or compelled to interview me. Especially because Mircea had said that you had nothing to question me about (!) My relations with the Assault become tensioned, and this is very good. So, go ahead, Mugur!
MG:
With all my heart, but because of your answers, I think that only between the lines can be presumed my eyebrows’ motions to your words. ...Yeah, interesting...By the way, this must be a word in fashion, of course, I think it is already delivered at the aesthetic lectures, because it is an important gain for speech, the interesting ... There are a lot of things which can’t join today the old categories of the beautiful. So, what have the people thought? Instead of be rude or appear retrograde ones, and then people find that it was an attitude without vision, we better shake our head in a diagonal movement - nor approval, nor grumbling - and we said that it’s interesting... But, let’s dare to put it bluntly! What means, in fact, the vanguard? If you look attentively to what happens in this world (it’s enough to delay a few days through the workshops of the “young wolves” from around here...) you’ll be surprised how many people crowd to “invent” something, anything, a little scandal, or to smash the target, in fact, to enter his own character on a list of contemporary noises with (non)cultural airs... I have had hundreds of boring conversations with some of them. And their conclusions reduced themselves to “that has been done before”, “that hasn’t been done before”... Sometimes you go mad just staying and following everyone’s race to bring something new, a hachure more crooked, a mixture of styles (I call that necroculture), technics, concepts and ... almost that’s all. Have you ever thought to the rictus of the other experimentalists when you speak about outerart? Are you sure that programmatically it can be brought something new in art or literature? I have an impression that I have met through a lot of workshops the things you are talking about. I don’t want to invalidate your (outer-)artistic approach as a vector of an intimate indisputable experience, as a personal level of consciousness! But how much of your theoretical speech can objectify systematically what you propose. If your gestures, as fruits of a mind unperverted by a vocational educational system, can be interpreted as authentic ones, uncareeristic ones, you put yourself in the row of rough Art, even when you said that, in fact, that is a hobby for you. What takes you out of this area is the excess of artistic conscience (you are allowed to smile or to swear...). You’ve made for a system and you’ve assimilated theories and things that, very likely, can’t belong to you! I can imagine, for instance, what a punch you would get from one of my friends (I don’t mention names... an important person!) who already have filled a garret (and something besides!) with experiments in the manner of those you mentioned, if I told him that he imitated Smarandache’s (outer-)art! He wants to feel very sure and original in what he dares to build, and the first punches in face got by these young people, in school, come from those who remind them that this has already been done before, that there is nothing new under the sun. In consequence, nobody stops you from developing your own program of prospecting some new forms of artistic expression and achievement...But when will you be able to stop and thrust the flag saying that new world is yours? Don’t you risk to uncover again Columbus’ egg? In what measure someone is allowed to dare to generate some large concepts as a result of some approaches which, finally, belong to creation’s intimacy, to individuality? And who can homologate his approach?
FS:
I should answer in a few words to a one-page multi-questionnaire! The interesting is full of approving, disapproving and irresolute gestures- as in the neutrosophic logic: a third form. What is normal, in concordance with life; that is the object of creation is neither white nor black, but shaded. “The work is a living, reinterpretable body” (E. Negrici, “The involuntary expressivity”). It depends on the refraction sphere through which you watch, think, on time, space and other hidden parameters. The trouble involved by invention deserves all care. In fact, this is what the vanguard supposes: the new in form and/or content. If we live obsessed because “this has been done before”, we will annihilate ourselves. Nihil novi sub sole, then I am not in the game anymore! If there is nothing new under the sun, let’s keep hands in pockets! And not create anymore. However, as you wrote to me in an e- mail, it is not enough only the artistic or literary object, but also its theorization - the “attitude”, you have said. You have also to demonstrate with manifestoes, programs, comparisons that you have something special to add to creation’s field. And to prove that you are conscious of novelty and to persuade. Then, from that viewpoint, there is no originality. Briefly! Eminescu himself wasn’t the first romantic (Holderlin earlier), Ion Barbu took over the hermetism from West, the postmodernists descended from Beat Generation (1950-1960) (Ginsberg, Cummings etc.) or Gertrude Stein, or from the French le nouveau roman (Allain Robbe-Grillet, Margueritte Duras etc.) or from the Parisian group Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) (Péréc, Queneau, Francois Le Lionnais - the last two ones being mathematicians; Le Lionnais sent me a letter one month or two before his dying; at that time I was teaching in Morocco). What, did anyone else excel in Joyce’s experiments (“Ulysse”, “Finnegans Wake)? Moreover, I think that nobody is unique (in a certain way), but, at the same time, everyone is unique (in other way: the spirit, the personality are like fingerprints) In consequence, Eminescu is original in his matchless genius, Barbu brings a fresh air in the Romanian literature and the semiotic poetry of Romanian postmodernists has its proper valences (Emilia Parpalā-Afana). It’s good if you want to invalidate my speech, because you might succeed in driving me out of my wits, and then I would create with much anger! When you begin to do vanguard then you run all risks: the insult of a Mircea, the condescension of a Mugur, the ignorance of an Uncle Gheorghe. Any vanguard shocks and provokes repulsion at the beginning, then it is willy-nilly accepted, it turns into tradition in time and ends in commonplace and narrow-mindness (at a time with its epigonicity). If you call someone dadaist now, you depreciate him... The literature is enlarged with outer-literary elements, the art with outer-artistic elements - which are incorporated and digested. Look at the American Technical Sculpture (strange syntagm, isn’t it?): an Alexander Calder with techno-artistic hybrids- “The White Frame” (1934) built up with wires, wood, paper (!), and an engine- in order to turn it into a cinetique sculpture. Coming from outside you can bring surprising elements rather than staying inside. As at a brain storm, where some individuals completely strange with regard to a subject/project are put to tell their opinion...Curiously and very unexpectedly, isn’t it? Because the ones from inside the system are corseted with some pre-concepts out of which they can’t get out, while the others are free because they don’t know them (!) Attention, this method is applied to the science too! In connection with the necroculture you mentioned. Vasile Conta sustained in his theses that there is a bigger probability that vigorous successors should be born from unrelated crossings, as concerns the biological part. As a result, the extreme mixing of populations, as in a melting pot, transformed America in the most powerful and developed state. I think that his theses can be extended also to the literary, artistic, scientific fields. What I want to demonstrate: the “intrusion” of an outer-painter and outer-drawer like me, who has never liked to paint or to draw, can bring other kind of elements in art - in comparison to a formed artist like you. Sometime perhaps you’ll be a “great artist”, and me, a “great outer- artist”, okay dock? My advantage is that I am not gifted for painting and neither for art criticism, that’s why my art becomes more striking (to be read “worst” in a positive sense, more outer-art) than that one of your fellow. When I begin to do something, it results something else. The painting, for which I am not gifted, and recently the photo (I refer to the experimental one and to the collages in addition) intrigues me, stirs me up. As for me I haven’t had and I won’t ever have any exhibition... Then it happens also some questions that appear simultaneously. If Jerome K. Jerome with his British humour published “The art to not write a novel”, let’s extend it to the art to not do art, that represents the Outer-Art. In a clear essay (“Biography of the idea of literature”), lucidly flowing and attracting to lecture, published on the first page of the Craiovean “Mozaic” journal, Adrian Marino talked about “aliterature”, “nonliterature” and “antiliterature”: “On the one hand nothing is literature. On the other hand all is or can be literature. The notion of literary genre disappears” [I don’t agree with him that the nonliterature is impossible.] While Serban Andronescu has called them “contraculture”. I prognosticate that these ones will become, in time, forms of literature (the interior assumes its exterior). You can’t say that I have assumed theories and things which didn’t belong to me but, on the contrary, I have gone upside down: I have contradict theories and things which worried my brains. When the majority followed a (political, social, artistic) norm, I was exploring the reverse one. {Don’t go with the crowd.} Because I have lived in the communist epoch and I have been very attentive to anything that seemed officially. Where is that critic, with a Herder stipend, who advised me how to write, because I should be infinitely pleased to express myself in the opposite sense (I remember that Raducanu, the goal-keeper, before the Soccer World Cup in Mexico, in 1970, had declared that he wished to feint at Pele). I have read with interest how to books, concerning the writing, but not to follow them but to experience exactly the opposite. I have done the same with literary and artistic currents. And I’ve forgotten the limits and I’ve crossed the threshold to mathematics, and recently to physics- drawing other ones contempt upon myself(!) However I have wanted a positive denying, not a destruction by all means, as is the case with dadaism and lettrism. At the same time, I have liked to put face to face cultivated men (and science men, physicists, for instance - where there are many contradictory hypotheses) with opposed ideas (especially that everyone “demonstrated” that he was right; and, really, all were right and wrong at the same time!), a kind of philosophia perenis. I have also an article which is to be published, called: ”Neutrosophy, a New Branch of Philosophy”. pArAdOxIsM (the upside down writing, the writing outside writing; the upside down art, the art outside art) would be like a right-handed person who writes with the left hand, or like a painter who can’t control the brush. Unlike the other currents which are dead, paradoxism will last for ever under different forms, because it is in man and in nature: there will always be proceedings, methods, styles, aphorisms, metaphors, opposite theories simultaneously true. And what do you want from me: to begin to walk upright in art just now? At the beginning I begged you with fine arts until you made me to beg you with ugly arts. We don’t live in the Victorian epoch. It is a fashion in outer-art a un-pictorialization, a un-sculpturalization, and in literature an un-literaturalization - so far as the alienation of the artistic and of the literary from other epistemological fields. I do not accept to write a plentifully of repetitive books (I mean in the same style), as well as Mihai Beniuc for instance (excepting his “Apple beside the road”). But let me ask you now: after dadaism, what was the use of lettrism? The first made destruction at the level of words, the other at the level of phonemes/letters. To what use Ionesco’s Absurd Theater- hasn’t it been a form of dadaism? Or to what use Arrabal’s Cruel Theater (who has really cut living gooses on stage- what would have said those with animals rights from America? Or the manifestoes of Ozenfant (painter) and Le Corbusier (architect) in 1918: they tried to separate from Cubism in the so-called “Purism”. Why? Because they had been bored with the same style, they had exhausted the inspiration sources. We won’t eat stewed beans or post- modernism for ever! What, anybody had done dadaism before Tzara, Marcel Iancu, Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, Jean (Hans) Arp, Hans Richter? Incongruent texts have been from the Middle Age, but they hadn’t been given a conscious destructive, anti interpretation. Haven’t been naturalist writings before Zola? (At least in the private, unpublished correspondence of anonymous people.) The object of art or literature had been in various forms before the initiators, but not its theorization or its awareness. Maybe for this reason Van Gogh becomes more intriguing: his letters toward his brother Theo are devastating, but they became part of the theory: ”I am trying to exaggerate the main point and to let the rest vaguely”; “instead of reproducing exactly what I can see in front of my eyes, I use the colours rather arbitrarily”. The movements are done through the theorization of some critics or of the artists/writers themselves. Otherwise they could pass not aware by public. Look, in the Romanian literature there is the School from Targovişte (M. H. Simionescu, Radu Petrescu, Costache Olāreanu, Tudor Popa etc.); I don’t consider they are so different from others, but there are someone who have “demonstrated” it (I. Buzera etc.)... The impressionism (1863) resulted from a deviation of the realism (see Manet, who had exhibited to “The Refused Ones Hall”!); diminishing of clearness, dimming of image and outlines (Renoir, Monet, Pissaro, Bazille, Sisley). At the beginning it wasn’t too distinguished of the realism and the first impressionists didn’t even know they were doing impressionism! Who named them? A critic (Louis Leroy)! The gradual disappearance of form (Seurat, Cézanne, Signac) gave birth to post- impressionism. Who named it? A critic again (Roger Fry)! Then the artists muttered to themselves: let’s work to the content too, to find new principles of synthesizing. And they set up the symbolism (Moreau, Chavannes, Redon, Gaugain). Many vanguards have been imposed through a scandal- because they opposed themselves to the old artistic order. A current appeared as a reaction against other: “Only the one who renews remains true.” (Nietzsche). Pascin, a Bulgarian painter, committed suicide (1930) just in the opening day of a great exhibition of himself - so the artists try the impossible, they often make desperate gestures to be taken into account. Van Gogh cut his ear and sent it in an envelope to his fiancée, because she had affirmed that she admired most of all at him his ear! And to semi-paraphrase Brassaï, a Hungarian photographer from Transilvania, I say “ I am trying to invent and to imagine the impossible in art”, okay? Ever since 1980, together with the paradoxism, I have been interested in the currents/vanguards in literature and art. There are much many “isms”. some of them less striking - maybe that’s why unknown, or maybe because of the non-international place of their manifestation (that is to meet Ara Ghemigian’s approval). I have always tried to see the difference between currents/vanguards and what exactly produces the turn in the artistic world (excepting the vanity of creators!) For instance, in 1993 I was invited to some conferences on paradoxism in Brasil (I liked the exotism of this country, its strange fruits; I also met the Romanian ambassador, who approached me “hey, Oltenian...”), and there I took knowledge of Brazilians’ experiments. Some vanguards and denominations appear accidentally, having even a improper name. Others serve for propaganda [I am irritated also by the plenty of Western names (or launched because of the West) in art]. If you do something in New York it is heard louder than from Bucharest, and analogically, from Bucharest it is heard louder than from Râmnicu Vâlcea! However an artistic policentrism begins to be felt - and this is everyone’s chance, and Electronic Art gives hopes to everybody (but a selection intervenes also here: the computerists are favoured). In States the software engineer job is considered the most popular, appreciated and well-paid. Old people are refractory to Electronic Art- someone look like afraid to touch a computer!, but young people are attracted by it. In consequence Electronic Art is the future. Ask the consecrated writers/artists older than 50 from Romania. They haven’t got even an e-mail! They will speak you contemptuously about informatics - for instance, that it diminishes the artistic, vulgarizing it. [Look how the science, the technology influences everything: society, communications.] I think that new supports for art and literature will influence the creation (now in fashion is the electronic support) The border among the literary currents is not clear. A cubism with its angular forms a little moderated is called purism. Moreover, between cubism and futurism was the cubo-futurism has been formed. Or another: the fovismo-cubism (Delauney). Non idem est si duo dicunt idem = many times something smells of a fly, but in fact, sounds like cheese! What big difference between Miro’s organic surrealism and Picasso’s residues? Around 60’s Yves Klein organized an exhibition called “le vide” (the Americans translated with “nothingness”). Plus Yves manner to paint bluish “antropometrics” on rolled nudes. In America the vanguard is considered “underground”. Hugh Fox published recently 34 vanguard writers in “The Living Anthology: A prose Anthology”, 2000, in which he considers that those writers have been marginalized. I have shared experiences with American vanguardists as Stanley Berne (he sent me with dedication his prose volume “At One with Birds”) and Arlene Zekovsky (she published in 1999 a book called “Against the disappearance of the literature”!) from Santa Fe. I avow I agree the kitsch, because in the discussions groups [Latent_Nadir] and [Photomagazine] on internet, where you are “listmen” (a new, funny and ridiculous word), everybody manifested against it - and I like to oppose the majority; and the sterile beauty too. The difference between the artistic and the non-artistic is ambiguous, vague. Moreover, as regards the contemporary art, we can say that “it exists but is completely missing”! I don’t want to respect Cézanne’s Spatial Objects Theory, nor Chevreul’s Theory of Colours. Marin Mincu’s words you have mentioned, “poetry is the most difficult to write because it is the easiest to be written”, let’s generalize to: “painting is easy done by the one who doesn’t know to paint”- and this is me (!) The mutated ones and the mutant ones will always be in letters, art, science (here I refer to modern logics: intuitionistic, paraconsistent, fuzzy, neutrosophic). Towards the end of the 19th century it seemed that everything had been discovered in physics - it remained but some little gaps to be filled here and there. But at the same time with the discovery of the atomic microcosm, quantum physics, many classical principles have been overthrown and a new research field has been opened. The determinism has been refuted - see Brownian movement etc. The scientific traditionalism has been thoroughly shaken. What do you think about the Romanian folk songs interpreted with English texts? Discussing with the friend Serban Nereju (Necula), in the concentration camp for political refugees in Istanbul, he found the idea very smart, and after he emigrated in Australia he applied it and brought out a CD, broadcaster to a radio station in Sidney. Watching, Columbus’ egg: yes, but it does matter who has the courage or the madness to expose “Smarandache’s outer-art” {through definitions (genus proximus + specific distinction) theories, manifestoes, delimitation from other vanguards, outside the artistic object - and necessary more as an example}. And I assumed this risk. Many people will say : {such a thing we have been able to do ourselves too...But why haven’t you done?! Dear sirs, I am sending you a vanguard, but don’t be angry with me again. Have you ever thought to paint, to photo, to sculpture the subconscious? And because you haven’t entitled the interview “A (dare-) devil of an Oltenian!”, as I have been afraid of, but “A new cultural (dis)order”, let’s see what the economists say about (dis)order/ (dis)equilibrium: - Leon Walras speaks about a “stable equilibrium” (he certainly doesn’t stick in the mud in economics like me in humanistic) - but we dare to transpose his concept in the world of arts and letters; - Keynes describes “an economy of the disequilibrium”- we replace “economy” with “art/literature”; - Anghel Ruginā introduces an Orientation Table, through which he affirms that an economic (but it can be an artistic one too) system has a percentage of equilibrium and another of disequilibrium; Let’s carry on, considering “the system is neutrosophic”, that is it has a percentage of equilibrium, another one of disequilibrium and another one indeterminate. Something like this happens in the art/literature: an artistic/literary current is like a system, stable at the beginning. Then it loses its balance - internal and external factors “help”- that is the artists/writers become heretics and desert the movement. And this current is replaced with other, in which influences can be felt from the previous one. But there will be for ever manifestations PRO and AGAINST that current (for instance, the paradoxism). And this is Rugina’s Table. More general, like to the vote: there will be, beside these manifestations, indifferent attitudes (NEUTRAL) and I gave examples in neutrosophic logic which Mircea can’t abide.
MG:
I have taken very seriously what you have told above about that “drawing with blood”, as funny would be that story on its whole.
FS:
This is completely true. And it is not funny at all... My wife is witness; she told that I had a cycle ...at the nose! My older son, Mihai, a student now, has the same sensibility - unfortunately... Then, that blood is flowing almost daily, sometimes twice a day, for instance, when someone makes me nervous or a thing obsesses me at the most - that’s the way my organism discharges itself. I went to the doctor for countless times: in Romania, in Morocco - where I taught mathematics in French as a co-operation teacher, then in America. Everybody said I was all right! They cauterized me (burned my veins in the nostrils), operated upon me (in vain) as if I have had maxillary sinusitis, my mother wept - I was her only son - until doctor Grigorescu from Districtual Hospital in Craiova told her the haemorrhage had a nervous cause. After that he added to my mother...”That’s better, because if the blood flew inside the boy would have complications, he could even dye” - I was a student in the first or the second year at that time; I had been put in hospital for two weeks. So this is the way I relieve myself.... Emigrated in America, I went also here to different doctors. Everybody ... I am all right. But, dear sirs, then why my nose is bleeding so often, sometimes it gushes without even I touch it. Some affirmed I had too much blood, another doctor told me again ...it’s all right. And do you know why? Because the blood renews by itself - the organism has always to replace the old blood with the new one ( I don’t need to exchange my blood - as people said about Gicā Petrescu, the singer), that’s why I’m looking younger: at over 40 like someone of about 30. So, no great loss without some small gain. And, taking the paper under my nose to not flow on the carpet and wash bowl, what occurred to me: let turn my defect into a virtue. The painting with blood. I didn’t paint with my blood in a metaphoric sense - as the ardent poets so-called patriots recite- but in a proper, real sense. Do you understand? Blood, blood.
MG:
Well, but this is not just what I said. In a meeting of the Tuesday Literary Circle, Marin Mincu had interpellated a young “poetess” or “lyricist” who shaped plentifully sterile beauty with the phrases: ”Young girl, to write poetry is maybe the hardest thing in the world! Just because it seems so simple!” I don’t know if this is a good example. It’s hard to quote Marin Mincu in his absence, maybe because his presence can’t be recovered in words. The words reflect in a too little measure the highness of the mouth that generated them - and I feel obliged to emphasize this sweet misinterpretation... You try to embezzle in a “paradoxist” way the coin with Caesar’s figure. It has come out pitch and you say it’s toss. Let’s render to Brutus the things that are Brutus’. Leonardo wrote in his treatise of painting that the artist didn’t have to fear of mob’s opinion, because although they were a few those who could “lay” a successful image on canvas, anyone could appreciate if a nose was rightly proportioned or if the artist laid it senselessly on face. (Also he didn’t say that painting is as easy as “reading” an image...). But that takes of a well determined context, the exact height of a mouth! I doubt it’s worthy to seek here the navel of a paradoxist axiom...(I am even ill-disposed having the stupid role of the one who comes with the rubber in hands!) So, on the one hand, the “outer-art” is the whole space described outside the present borders of the (official) art. I don’t know why do you place here also some territories already conceptually annexed, almost canonized...Well...A slice from that map it has already been due to the rough art, for instance...But if the (outer)art is everywhere, the (outer)artist is only the owner of a particular level of consciousness. Isn’t he? When Dubuffet extended the border, he exalted the rough (in-raw) art exactly for the characters with an unconsolidated, uninstitutionalized level of conscience, unperverted with theories and concepts...First of all you introduce the democratic algorithm: “all is art, the outer-art too” (reminding of that famous play on ideas - “you don’t believe in God, so the atheism is your religion”) - but that only for introducing in “the high society” an outsider. The introducing being done, your guest remains on the threshold staring at those from inside: “From the point I am standing, it seems to me that you are the ones from outside!...” In fact, as much as the people were move around you, the threshold you are talking about could not be crossed, because it is traced by your own character, it moves together with him! You are the only one who venture to deny or to annex, at his own will, to decide what stay in the left side and what in the right side. In that case the paradox is applied only to one person, it can’t be objectified! When I am in the underground and I hear the next stop is on the left, at that moment I might stay with the back to the sense of movement and I believed the platform will lay on my left! To preach this belief to those around me is a pathetic gesture or something interesting as a peripheral, casual experience..., even as a sophism, but it will never be one with the path, it won’t embezzle the real co-ordinates of the system where it evolves, because the platform won’t move every time I think right to turn round in the train. As simple will be to try contradict alone programatically all that means artistic know-how. Naturally you would come in time to an absolute weakening of the conscience of your cultural co-ordinates, as inside and outside are the same. That you try to turn visible a character, that’s understandable. But as a system - you preach the intangible! What can be fresh in that story? Only a personal contribution of an ontological tension, a kind of a romantic hero punk hair-dressed... Otherwise, if you lose sight that the only axiological reference point you propose is your own character (with his terrible damage...) - could you estimate emphatically how such a system could be applied beyond the will and the border it traced in the system? Because, as well as the other players in the cultural system, you’ll be a victim of your own refusals and doubts, a slave of your own tastes and objections - what constitute the flavour of the elementary individuation... Recently, for instance, you have told me that Marius Ianuş didn’t write poetry but made decorative noises. What means, in the same context, “to do poetry”?. Do you agree to apply your axiom on a large area or only contextual? Let’s suppose that Marius Ianuş refuses to write “worship”, flattering poetry , so that different social categories expectorate him somewhere, “outside”... And so he practice a (non)writing...Maybe he doesn’t even know how to write a poem! But who knows, in fact, how to write poetry? How can you grow so that you be placed permanently into the perfect co-ordinates - inside, outside or on the border? Does your system propose an axiology, can it note such a performance? Who can homologate that performance? (The fulcrum, it was agreed once, should be outside in order to overthrow the Earth...) What value system do you apply when you judge the (non)cultural deeds of the others? I insist in asking you - who and how operates that system, how the other kind of speeches are invalidated in relation with it and why? Returning now to the story at the beginning... The majority of us have the vice of orallity, and sometimes of (in)cult chatter... Sometimes we read with the same frivolity we chatter. And we can move this frivolity in signs’ area to reach the tics bantered by mister Marin Mincu phrase. In this way we reach also the “sterile beauty”... As in the first classes of school, when we begin to play with little sticks, we mix semiotics and significants with the calligraphy... In time, the desire to “write properly” can easily flood the significants only out of the our unmeasured ambition to leave the marks of our funny passing through a recognoscible decor. Here throne cheerfully the lyricists or the poetesses we have talked about earlier... Around here roves jovially, in a party- minded manner or even arrogantly, the Kitsch itself, that you evoked with fun earlier...But these vices have already been exploited industriously by a number of revoluted movements that created noisy paths through this undermined area... Do you think it’s still funny, beyond the individual prospection, the “industrial” reinvention and implementation of such a system? (I mention arbitrarily a few names of the mid of the last century, J. Chamberlain in USA, Cesar in France or the Independent Group in London - with Richard Hamilton on the top of the stick... They also haven’t got cool yet. Do you think the world is so eager to see cloned and renamed so soon its little terrors? A rhetoric question in a rhetoric questions pot ...It won’t be even noticed...) So, many of vanguard’s deeds, once finished, are no more... vanguard. They left victims and epigones, but it’s evident they can’t recognize the past intensity, that is not at a level of kit, of cultural system... These are adjudicated, paraphrased, consumed histories ...I remember when I was about 14, when I hadn’t even caught to blunt the Flaro pen with my first texts somehow more valuable, I had begun to scrape up “neo(necro)vanguardist” manifestoes on the solemnly at random writing and the praising up to the skies of some dadaisto-renascentist nonsense’s! Later I found that, beyond the personal traumatisms of assuming an obscure mission “on the front” of a humanistic area, there were as many individualities who followed their own reflexes, after some indecipherable, unique patterns. Is there any sense trying to spiritually annex some continents so distant, by manipulating some maps whose present interest is so doubtfully?... The picaresque character you propose has colour, blood and muscles. How it will look like when you succeed in cloning it? It will result an army, a regiment, a phalanx?
FS:
I have to come with pluri-answers now and to take it easy, as well as Dolānescu ...What else could I retort to an essay than another essay? We rely on standards in order to understand each other, we live in a world of the conventionalism. When you affirm that “it has come out pitch and you say it’s toss”, it depends on the viewpoint you look at. If you look from above: it’s pitch, but if I bent a little and I look from below: it’s toss. Why shouldn’t we analyse from all the viewpoints, artistic ones or non? As in the case of jazz music: at every hearing/feeling it appear differently; or as in the case of comedia del arte, even if involved in improvisations. Not all vanguards have a destructive character: Pop Art, for instance, based on advertising, collages, commercials; and the OuterArt really try to transform in art its exterior, taking what it is neither ugly nor beautiful - the neutro-sophic/the neutro-artistic. Through denying the paradoxism does not destroy but explores the reverse side. Hadn’t Voltaire affirmed the laws in art had been made to be infringed? As concerns the actuality, doubtful or not: it’s true that in dictatorship time it had more adherence, although the manifesto had been orally delivered - because I haven’t been allowed to publish almost anything (even mathematics the School Inspectorate Dolj had interdicted me in its reviews) - that’s the very reason I ... ”Escaped... / The Concentration camp diary” to Turkey. The socio-political background has implied the paradoxist form. Look some simplified ideas, not to Mircea’s taste: The paradoxism started as an antitotalitarian protest against a closed society, Romania of 1980 years, where the whole culture was manipulated by a single group. Only their ideas mattered. We, the other ones, could not publish almost anything. And then I said: let’s do literature ...without doing literature! Let’s write...without write anything. How? Simply: the literature-object. ‘A bird’s flight’, for instance, represented “a natural poem”, which needn’t to be written, being more touchable and perceptible than some signs laid on a paper, which, in fact, would have constituted an “artificial poem”: deformed, resulted through a translation of the observed by the observant, and any translation falsified in a certain measure. ‘The cars rattling on the streets’ was a “urban poem”, ‘the peasants mowing’ a “disseminationist poem”, the ‘ open-eyes dream’ a “surrealist poem”, ‘the nonsense talking’ a “dadaist poem”, ‘the conversation in Chinese for an unknown of that language’ a “lettrist poem” , ‘travelers’ alternating discussions, in a station, on varied subjects’ a “postmodernist poem” (inter- textualism). A vertically classification? “Visual poem”, “sonorous poem”, “olfactive poem”, “gustative poem”, “tactile poem”. Another classification, diagonally: ”phenomenon (of nature) poem”, “mood poem”, “object/thing poem”. Analogous in painting, sculpture - in nature all were in readiness. In consequence I did a silent protest! Later on, I based upon contradictions. Why? Because I was living a double life in that society: an official one - preached by the political system and another one real. Mass media promulgated ‘our life was wonderful’, but actually ‘our life was miserable’. The paradox in bloom! And then I turned the creation into derision, in reverse senses, syncretically. So the paradoxism was born. The popular jokes, in big fashion in Ceauşescu ‘Epoch’, as an intellectual breath, were some splendid inspiration sources. The Non” and the “Anti” from my paradoxist manifestoes have a creative character, not at all a “nihilistic” one (C.M. Popa). The transition from paradoxes to paradoxism was described in a very well documented way by Titu Popescu in a classical book on the movement: “The aesthetics of paradoxism” (1994): http://www.gallup.unm.edu/~smarandache/Aesthetics.pdf. While Ion Soare, I. Rotaru, M. Barbu, M. N. Rusu, Gh. Niculescu studied the paradoxism in my literary work. N. Manolescu expressed himself about a volume of verses of mine that it was “against the grain”. It wasn’t a precursor who has influenced me, but I drew my inspiration from the upside-down situation in the country. I started from the politic, the social and I arrived to literature, art, philosophy and even science. Through experiments based on contradictions, new terms were brought in literature, art, philosophy, science, even new proceedings, methods, algorithms of creation. In one of my manifestoes I had proposed the embezzlement of sense, from figurative to proper, counter-sense interpretations of the linguistic expressions and clichés, etc.
Vanguards result also through the inversion of the axiological criteria. If we changed the norm in the theory of (aesthetic) measure? You have to be acquainted with what is not written and what is not done in art - in order to occupy that vacant land, to fallow it... Look, the seeking for a new transmission support for literature, art, culture. At present the electronic one is in fashion: isn’t it smelled in closeness even an electronic art? [a strange community of terms]. We use the e-mail, e-group, e-book.
In the ancient tragedy, in the detective novels, the plot, the mystery prevailed; then Becket came with “En atttendant Godot” [Waiting for Godot], and no plot existed anymore, and the spectator of his drama was bored to death
Culture repeats itself, as well as life, but at a superior, different level. Romanticism, neoromanticism, classicism, neoclassicism, realism, neorealism, paradoxism now, neoparadoxism tomorrow. Culture repeats itself, compared with science, that increases exponentially. Fortunately, science influences culture, giving it new supports, new methods, creation instruments one can say. In consequence, the culture does not repeat itself. What do you say about the (kinetic) painting with little engine and videotape? Georges Pompidou Cultural Center in Paris (architects: Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano) looks like an upside-down Bauhaus, that I visited in the summer of 1992), having the aspect of an... oil distillery! Some French artists were indignant of that cheeky immixture of technique in art. The “Bauhaus” was a German movement of joining science and art in architecture. Marinetti rejected the past, exalting the machine (1909-10). Umberto Boccioni, in his futurism, tried to express the new sense of space-time given by Minkowsky and Einstein from physics in painting: “The dynamism of a cyclist” (1913). The architects are scientists and artists: Heleman Ferguson’s sculptures are composed of geometric forms, as well as Möbius bands, torsos - cast on graphical computers according to mathematical formulas and algorithms. The Greek-French engineer and architect Yanis Xenakis, born in Brāila, composed in Paris vanguard music (wordless voices; in “Metastasis” a plane taking its flight can be heard!; other compositions follow Big Numbers Law of Poisson), using laws from physical sciences, in consequence, accused that he had written insensitive music. Extravagantly. Others, through simple methods - as the repetition (Reich, Gorecki) come to special effects. There will be for ever vanguards, otherwise art, letters would dye... Old experiments will come back with the prefix neo- as in a spiral (neo-dada, neo-impressionism, neo-expressionism, neo-...). Do you really think the new will disappear? Or through the combination of the previous vanguards, as well as fluxus - especially in the scenic representation, which meant through 1960 in USA: a part of Dada, a part of Bauhaus and a part of Zen, relying on spontaneity, minimallity, maybe some tricks that even wounded the actors. Among such artists I mention the Japanese Yoko Ono, famous John Lennon’s widow, the Beatles’s leader. There are also some movements less known: Colour Field Painting, Action Paint, Informal Art (that doesn’t mean formless art), Fluxus, Conceptual Art (the idea has the precedence of the object in visual). Smaller transformations, bigger transformations... As anyway I am not an artist (but an outerartist) and I am not gifted for painting and I had to accumulate material again for the unfinished interview with the worthies Mugur - photomagazin’s reporter or editor - and Mircea Herder, the Conceptual Art appeared through 1963 and was recognized in 1970 with an exhibition in New York, suggestively named, “Information”. Its outstanding feature was “objective art’s dematerialization”, in the sense that ‘object’ was replaced by ‘idea’ as regards the importance. That was an anti-formalist current - according to the critic Lucy Lippard. Thus Joseph Kosuth posted a painting made up only of letters, nothing drawn, painted or photographed: “The art as Idea as Idea”, 1966, on which he had copied from the dictionary the definition of the English word “painting” (and its connotations). Moreover: he declared the whole art was conceptual in nature, because the art existed but in function of the concepts (attitudes, visions, ideas). Conceptual Art came from Minimalist Sculpture [Sol Le Witt, who affirmed: the idea is the engine that generates the art - in the sense that after you had the idea (= the plan/project/decision) of realizing an artistic object, its carrying out becomes mechanical, a routine], and in photography Conceptual Art presented posters and advertisement - in consequence, it transmitted ‘information’. Other representatives: Daniel Buren, Lawrence Weiner, Robert Barry. Certainly, as in any other vanguard, including even paradoxism, it has been a need that the artistic world become aware of that new style or spirit in creation, named Conceptual Art , through essays and manifestoes written by critics or artists (or writers in other cases). Conceptual Art appeared before the so-called “postmodernism” - in fact an ambiguous notion, disputed by some critics, considering it has been initiated in ‘80 (etymologically postmodernism would mean “after modernism”, but each epoch has its own modernism, contemporary with it, in consequence postmodernism related to an epoch became modernism related to another epoch!). I think ‘postmodernism’ is swollen with anything that is considered ‘experiment’ and in particular with ‘intertextuality’ and ’transdisciplinarity’ - but these matters appear as far as Beaudelaire, the poet (he called them “eclecticism”). Marcel Duchamp, through his “ready made” objects, influenced Junk Sculpture’s coming out (from unusable waste ... objects of art!). The baroquists bedizened the art with all kind of flowerets, the supremacists reduced it to a few elements (some lines, two colours, simplicity - see “The rectangles”, which haven’t been too rectangles, of a Malevich). John Cage, with whom I have had the honour to exchange some epistles, an American experimentalist musician, composed once in a concert a ...silent song! When the title of his score was announced, that was “4’30” (= four minutes and thirty seconds), nothing was sung in that while. The audience was upset waiting the song to “start”...But the fuss and the noises of the audience made up themselves ...the score! The slanderous tongues commented that was his best composition(!) Being a political refugee in the Turkish concentration camp, together with a great number of sailors from Constanta, your town, who had jumped in Bosfor, I participated to a symphonic concert given by L’Institut d’Etudes Français d’Istambul. There, a Japanese singer, emigrated in France, instead of playing on the strings beat somehow primitively on instrument’s wood.
Artistic crises play their part and owing to them the progress comes out. If there wasn’t a precipice, the mountain wouldn’t be noticed. Nothing is constant or static but the change. Inevitably! In consequence: no great loss without some small gain!
That charge “it has been done before”, you can throw easily upon anyone. It becomes even a prejudice. Does there exist someone to “completely” be original? Come on! To be more clear (or, on the contrary, more confuse) the difference between L’Art Brut (art-in-the-raw) (1945) and OuterArt (1990): a) Art-in-the-raw was made out of heart, even by children and lunatics who did it awkwardly, so that it looked like raw, unripe, frenetic, in a word, rough; OuterArt is made out of routine, an object which didn’t have an “artistic” aim at the beginning and which belonged to some fields outside the art; b) In art-in-the-raw it was tried to be expressed of the beautiful - although represented at an amateur elementary level, everyone how knew to do it better; in OuterArt it’s expressed the ugly as it is and the beautiful is ugly field; at the same time the neuter is revealed (a notion between beautiful and ugly). c) Art-in-the-raw was deliberate. OuterArt is casual. d) art-in-the-raw was used as a release of the subconscient, especially for lunatics, as a therapy (see for instance: psycho-dramaturgy, psycho-art, psycho-literature); in that way the psychiatrists could study patients’ obsessions (even children’s, often in the impossibility to express what made them anxious), trying to diminish them, in consequence a method of treatment; OuterArt uses the conscient, is planned, organized, directed to the real life. e) The essential difference is that however art-in-the-raw is with intention, in the sense that the subjects drew and painted being conscious of their action; OuterArt is without intention, for instance: in “Outer-Art” the ‘non-drawings’ (pag. 92-96), the ‘anti-drawings/ sketches’ (108-114) at the beginning they were but some simple drafts in my rough notebook of daily duties, without any relation with the art. Only later, looking through the drafts to see what duties had left (shopping, attempts to demonstrate some mathematical theorems for some researching articles, necessary car repairs, new soft to be learn and load on computer, telephone calls, bill payments, addresses of some friends) I found out to my surprise that some pages had a particular form- the lines that cut the already done duties looked joyfully like some drawings, the question marks (unsolved problems) harmed the sight ... I could take them as compositions of ... ‘modern art’. Today everything ‘special’ is called ‘modern’! Saltier than salt (?) Or ‘scratching’ (in the proper sense!), especially from the second part, called also “ante-art” (attention, non ‘anti’) or “post-art”,
Sometimes you take the things too mot-a-mot. The systems in art are like some amoebas: without some fixed forms, but changeable.
Of course, we all are subjective, controlled by feelings, the gypsy defends its hammer. All is doubtful in the final.
Around someone promoted from the center it is made a big noise - that’s why I’m looking skeptically to the Romanian cultural centralism (a communist legacy?)...
The present non-poetry may signify the future poetry.
Do you refer to “the only reference point you propose is your character”, but didn’t Dubuffet formed alone a current (called “art-in-the-raw”)? In the Parisian collection that began in 1945 the others were some anonymous. However you haven’t seen the paradoxist anthologies. In the second one are included, let’s say, the “lyricists” (instead of outer-poets or experimentalists), 100 literary men from the globe, with writings in different languages and in the third one, around 40 (with paradoxist distichs even in Chinese!).
The refusal is a part of art, it’s more plastic, more urging and more attractive than agreement. The refusal is more artistic than agreement.
John Chamberlaine is the representative of Buildings and Assembling Art where one can’t know if the result is a sculpture or anything else! With dismembered parts from a car (the science and technical again) it is reassembled an ‘object’ (from useless wastes, objects of art somehow useful; the new is formed out of the old). That method is like Junk Sculpture [another example of the impossibility of borders in art - therefore the necessity of the abuse of public conscious as regards the (non)artistic one]. He joins various materials (metal, rope, wood etc.). Rauschamberg, for instance, even combined the painting (a picture) with the assembling (a cushion, a pedestal and a support of wood), “Odalisk”, 1955-8.
Or Louise Nevelson, categorized as assemblist (in wood), but environmentalist too (Environmental Art).
Using pure harmonious colours, independent of nature, Robert and Sonia Delaunay have formed a current they called “orphism”, while the same current the Americans Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russel call “synchronism”!
Let’s take Earth Art, a sculpture of the environment, that is at a mega level (dimension of a few miles) compared to the previous sculpture, limited in space. And that Earth Art became possible owing to science and technology too (machinery that allowed these buildings) - “Unloading dock in spiral” by Robert Smithson, from 1970, which is 457.2 meters long, in Great Salt Lake, Utah. There we have to remind the Bulgarian Christo (Javacheff) become known for trying to cover/pack up (only temporary, so much it was possible) of some islands with festive decorative tissues (or at least in intention, in project). Only to representatives we find also there - so not the number of persons involved in a creation style dictates the value.
As about Richard Hamilton, he belongs to Pop Art (1950), the commercial culture, resulted from collages based on advertisements, interfered with nudes, satires, illustrations, photos with personalities of the day, cartoons from the Anglo-Saxon space - Marcel Duchamp’s successor.
No one from above is close to OuterArt.
Rococo Art is in fact a late baroque in the decorative arts.
I have received from A. Rezus your volume - I was very curious and incited by the title, moreover that Herr Tug(u)lea is more reserved (he learned this from the Germans) as regards the exchange of contradictory communications. I stick the opinion that the “poetry” and the “prose” merge into a new literary genre - “p(r)oetry” (beginning with the modernists), a fortunate joining of notions sustaining the trans-disciplinarity. If somebody were ask you: what is the etymology of the word, what would you answer? Maybe sometime the dictionaries of literary terms will have to mention it. The breaking of the Tuglian verse reminds me of Cezar Baltag, a non-linear one, exactly to keep the suspense. The verses with head and tail put in line one after another make the poem monotonous, mechanical - especially in the classical form. As well as in the science, the nonlinearity is more complex and emphasized. The nonlinearity replaces the scarcity of metaphors in the contemporary poetry of the daily.
I have noticed at 90’s Romanian Generation, a prolongation from 80’s Generation, the attempt of non-phonetization of the language - after English models. Herr, oUr cOMmoN frIend, Muggur Grossu (to apply his own style!) was writing “kitschura” instead of the phonetic “chiciura”, while an 80’s representative said “hai-ku mine” instead of “hai cu mine”, etc. (the phonetic translation in Romanian ‘kitschura’= ‘hoar frost’ and ‘hai-ku mine’ = ‘come with me’). That is a un-trivialization of the words worn-out by time. It’s surprising that you, the youth, have become more Americans than me, the American citizen - who has been living over the ocean for ten years! You celebrate “Valentine’s Day” while for me this day passes unnoticed. You celebrate “Thanksgivings” I don’t know for what reason, because the Indians gave you nothing (!) - I am glad because I am free at the university for a week by the end of November. [As well as 23 August holiday was at the time of communists - when I didn’t go to work... macabre comparison!]
Then 90’s generation use the phonetic deviation - but the receiver has to be educated, initiated, cultivated. Also the German postmodernist poets had written in a period compound words (that in German are put in a single word), separately, that is parted - as in the majority of the other languages. Here is a light, surprising, subtle phonetic deviation from Jules Verne, as I have found in an ASSAULT: “20,000 miles under the seas” become “20,000 miles under the peas” (Madalin Rosioru). Or the paraphrasing (I would say a paradoxist method) of the classical and/or popular syntagms. But the translation is miscarried.
It is “an upside down creation”, at various degrees of turning back - a paradoxist method , I should affirm again. Look also: “Old man, how young are you!”, or the “sayings” which were reflected in “gain-sayings” (Silviu Danciu). What else to invent the poor writer, in that society of consumption - that will be imposed in Romania too, the country “specialized“ in imitating the foreign models and ignoring its own ones? A society which won’t care a straw of poetry and prose and... literary commentaries.
The forcing of language is pushed to the utmost limit in some texts, arriving to illisibility. And the more fragmentary the speeches are (Dumitru Crudu), tangled until hermetism (Stefan Peca, “Picabo/ Penguins”), with references as unheard as possible, moRRe mOdErN is konsyderating the l-i-t-e-r-a-t-e. It iS meAnt tO shock and skandall...
The nonlinear writing, as well as the programming, attracts more beginners.
The passion of quotations and self-quotations, cultural hints - in poetry - is as old as the world is; and the intertextuality receives it naturally.
I should parody Mircea voicing “Let’s remain with what we don’t have”!
“The unmeasured ambition to let the tracks of our joyful passing” is right: all artists suffer from vanity, maybe that’s why you have taken me this interview, maybe that’s why I have answered to you ...Who maintains the contrary is conceited and hypocritical.